Where would the Shockers stand if they competed in the (fill in the blank) Conference?

No. You do not get to ask these or any other questions about what this basketball team has accomplished, not unless you want to out yourself as obtuse. You can debate how Wichita State might perform in this year’s NCAA Tournament, because it surely is headed into the field at the conclusion of their stay in the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament. You can wonder whether the team will navigate up to five remaining games ahead of the NCAAs without falling on the wrong side of the final score.

To dismiss the value of remaining undefeated this long, however—or, worse, what the Shockers will have achieved if they earn two league victories this week and three more in St. Louis during the Valley tournament—is to reveal a shocking disregard for college basketball history.

The last time a team entered the NCAA Tournament with a perfect record was 1991, when UNLV’s Runnin’ Rebels won all 30 of their games prior to the round of 64. In 1991, Paula Abdul was still a pop star and Beyonce wasn’t yet 10 years old. New Kids on the Block did the halftime show at the Super Bowl and, indeed, they still were kids. Zac Efron was this many (holds up three fingers).

Since that UNLV team, there have been 23 college basketball seasons, including the one currently approaching its home stretch. There were right around 300 Division I teams in 1991. That number had grown to 325 a decade later and now stands at 345. So there have been right around 7,500 teams that have attempted to do what Wichita State is near to completing. Good gracious—7,500 teams! And none has been able to do it. Not one. So how could anyone maintain any credibility while dismissing what the Shockers are doing now?

Saint Joseph’s won every scheduled regular season game in the 2003-04 season before falling in its first game of the Atlantic 10 Conference Tournament. Stanford lost on the final day of the regular season that same year. Illinois won its first 29 games of the 2004-05 season before visiting Ohio State for its last regular-season game and being upset by the Buckeyes on a buzzer-beating jump shot. Few others even came close.

Wichita State has blown through nearly every barrier to a perfect season—every one, it seems, but the intolerance of those who would diminish any triumph that does not belong to a brand-name college program.

There were debates similar to this when Temple dominated the Atlantic 10 in 1987-88, with critics sneering about the Owls as though future first-round picks Mark Macon and Tim Perry were some sort of imposters. It was like with St. Joe’s, even though the Hawks’ backcourt featured long-term pros Jameer Nelson and Delonte West. And there it was against on my television Monday night regarding Wichita State, and one quick Google shows it infecting the Internet. This truly gets tiresome, because it’s all kinds of absurd.

Since the NCAA expanded March Madness to 64 teams in 1985, it has staged 29 tournaments. That means there have been 116 teams seeded No. 1. There have been 29 No. 1 seeds that entered with three losses, 27 with four losses and even three with seven losses, but only one—only one—with zero losses. That was Jerry Tarkanian’s Vegas bunch in 1991.

Wichita State’s schedule was easy? The Shockers have played the No. 104 schedule according to Jerry Palm’s RPI rankings for CBS Sports. Last year, the team that played the No. 104 schedule, Charlotte, finished 21-11. Year before that, it was UCLA, and the Bruins went 18-14. In 2004, Southern Illinois of the Missouri Valley went 25-4. But no one—no one—took the supposedly easy schedule that exists for a team with a 104 schedule ranking and won every game. And, more to the point, no one with a schedule ranked 204 or 304 did, either.

There have been teams in leagues as good as this year’s Valley, or worse, or much worse, and none did what Wichita State is doing now. Why is that? It’s because it takes an incredible team, one like this group from Wichita State. And there aren’t many of those.